Artist: Kathryn Foston
Email: meredin_seth@yahoo.com
Homepage: http://www.angelfire.com/film/Lahl/

Imagine: IFW 2.0
Platform: Celeron 500 MHz, 320 MB
Renderingtime: Waaaaaay toooooo looooong.....

The knife pictured here is called an "Athame". An Athame is a witches knife used to direct and focus energy. It is never used for cutting. This Athame is the design I would like to make for my own, but I lack the manual skills...... 3D will have to do for now :)
The Athame was almost completely modelled in the Forms Editor and the texturing was done with a lot of bitmaps and blended textures. I think I found a bug in Ingvar Lybing's Blending textures though. Although it worked fine in the detail editor, when I took it into the stage editor, the parameters in the BlendB.itx got screwed up. Had to adjust the textures in the stage and resave before it would work ok.
The picture was rendered in 4 different passes and composited in Photoshop where levels etc were tweaked.
Overall I think it turned out ok, but would have liked to do a few more things...... unfortunately I don't have the CPU power to do them atm.

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Later, on the IML...

Congratulations Kathryn thats a fabulous piece of work. I'm particularly impressed by the perfect metal finish. You made some mention in your notes but I and no doubt others on the list, would like to know how you achieved that look.
-Bernard

Thanks.... *blush* :)

Well...2 main things you need to know and understand to create metals (or any object)

1) Reflections. Without reflections the metal looks like.... well.... crap. You must choose the right reflection map to suit the object, test out a few different environments and see how the reflections play on the surface. Bumps will always look good to vary the reflections so it doesn't look too perfect. Also, a very small bump map will help to break up the reflection's sharpness and blur it depending on distance. you can also acheive anisotropic reflections and highlights with this technique.

2) Fresnel Fresnel Fresnel!!! Understand the Fresnel effest of how the viewing angle from the surface changes the surface properties, and use it AS MUCH AS YOU POSSIBLY CAN! Fresnel affects almost every single aspect of an objects surface properties. Use the fakely, ABfakely and ABfakeNC textures many many times for each attribute. I use them to make the edges of objects darker, reflections more intense, specular highlights sharper, reduce transparency, and sometimes to increase the IOR, as well as many other uses.

Some other techniques to make things more realistic:

Imperfection. The computer renders things with mathematical perfection, whereas the natural world is chaos. Don't rely only on algorithmic textures. Use brushmaps, draw them in photoshop, scan them from photos (although I didn't use any for this comp except for the tablecloth texture) just add that element of randomness that you can't get from textures, or use them to precisely control the placement of textures.

The handle of my Athame was textured by drawing a greyscale map which corresponded to the dents on the object, then using that to mask out which parts would reflect, which parts had bumps etc etc making extensive use of Ingvar's blending textures or using the map as a roughness map then keying off the roughness with ABcolorheight etc.

Also.... don't be afraid to use more than just a few testures. There were 31 textures/maps on the blade and only 12 on the main handle object. If things get too complex like it did creating the scratches on the blade, then render them out and use the rendering as a map to replace it.

eg. to create the scratches, there were 3 main surfaces that needed scratches in different orientations, so I rendered out a wireframe of the blade and in photoshop I painted out the different areas to mask out then in Imagine I blended together the 3 different bump mapped areas. But things were for some reason not going right when I tries to add reflections etc... giving rendering errors and artifacts. so I set the object to have the bumps only and set them to render as a b/w colour map then applied the rendering as a new bump map without the blending being necessary. I also used the same map to vary the colour, reflections, specular, hardness etc, and controlled each one's intensity with the mix/morph value.

Another area to consider is lighting. Experiment with the position of lights, see how the affect the specular highlights and you'll find some places produce some interesting specular highlights which just make the effect just that bit better.

Also, in my picture, I did not use harsh direct lighting. I used a technique to fake Global Illumination, and I used softshadow lights on the candles. All in all there were about 200 shadowcasting lights, which slowed the rendering down so much that the rendering time was measured in days, not hours. Not something I'd do again with Imagine, but I had to try :)

Anyway..... end of lesson for today hehe... didn't mean to go on for this long. Hope it helps answer your questions and didn't end up confusing you all more :)